This has been the food security week with the NAC and the courts getting into the last lap. The fact that a food security system will be set up is accepted by all and this column has always stood by that. A nation, growing the way India is and with its resource base, has no business accepting stark hunger as a given. Three issues have been raised. The first is coverage. The second is the nitty-gritty administrative and operational detail, so terribly important as it can make or mar a good idea. The third is the larger economy-level issues.
On coverage, the courts are clear. Only the deserving hungry should get free or subsidised grain. The business of otherwise rotting grain or rats eating it up only dramatises the stand. Those who can afford food should not be eligible. It is not that we cannot identify them. The number of ration card holders, in many cases, is more than the population of habitations. Many years ago I had shown that in Gujarat, if you exclude the rich, those who pay tax, have an organised sector job, own transport, pay irrigation cess and so on, the rest come close to poverty numbers.
This figures for the Engel?s Law on consumption income relations; it has been shown to work since ancient Rome. The Tendulkar Committee, we have argued, has fatal flaws but one advantage. It maps malnutrition distributions on expenditure distributions following Radhakrishna?s pioneering work. So, the severely undernourished can be identified statistically and correlated with location and economic status. This led to our malnourished girl child, pregnant mother, landless labourer and 150 districts, etc, suggestions that seem to have some acceptance, although it must be recognised that these are stylised facts and need greater scrutiny when you start spending money. The problem is not the technical work, but that the political process is not just focused on hunger but on constituencies. When you start taking away ration cards, all hell starts breaking loose. So you go from the hungry to the poor and the two are not the same and then some goodies (grain at less than market price) are needed for the non-poor. It is not practical politics to bell that cat. The BJP president has carried this to its logical absurdity by asking for a ceiling of Rs 1 lakh.
The courts also say, ?fix the poverty numbers?. This is almost beyond salvage now. First, in spite of good work on expenditure and nutrition profiles, the Tendulkar Committee just did not define a new poverty line. They took an old poverty line, which a group I had chaired in the mid-1970s developed, and said almost whimsically that the urban poverty variant of that should be the new national poverty line. This, we argued, will not wash. For some time, the Planning Commission stuck by Tendulkar and when that was contested they ducked. What an unholy mess! To top it up, they have asked Syed Raza Hashim, a very competent and, on development and poverty issues, like his class-fellow R Radhakrishna, a very experienced hand, to define urban poverty. But the problem is not technical. It needs political validation or that of a group of wise men who will not be contradicted as in the past. Technical reports will get into the same wall that the Tendulkar-Radhakrishna work did. In fact, in view of the technical work already done, the NAC is ideally placed to give a political sanction to a new concept of poverty and to put an end to the effort I started in 1989 to set up the Lakdawala Poverty Group in order to define a new poverty line and dump the old Alagh poverty line.
Operationally, the PDS was never good in states where malnutrition and poverty are the highest. If one includes alternatives like the school feeding and ICD programmes, the Antyodaya programme and others, including NGOs, like Akshaypatra, temples, gurudwaras and other religious places giving food to the hungry, delivery mechanisms to the really poor may start. Here even free food may be considered say for households without a male earning member or with handicapped earners. For above-poverty line people, the programmes may be no brainers in areas where the PDS is weak, as we see from offtake data. There does not seem to be in place any mechanism for implementing a scheme where say around two-fifths to half of the population in poor districts are the beneficiary.
Finally, the sustainability issue is not just the fiscal deficit. Frankly I believe that after initial hiccups a good scheme is viable. The problem is that if a large part of food demand is met by the state at low prices, the low agricultural prices lead to increasing malnutrition since small farmers and landless labourers suffer by loss of income. Andhra Pradesh?s Rs 2 a kg rice programme led to many adverse consequences for Andhra rice farming. Like the PDS, the MSPs don?t work in poor areas either, as the CACP reports dutifully show by giving the markets where agricultural prices fall below MSPs and now the FE also gives commodity quotations by markets. This is the reason to target the programme to the really hungry. More on this in a later piece on the OpEd Page.
The author is a former Union minister